Tech Talk: A new set of options

OPINIONS are divided on whether seven or 10-inch screens are best suited to tablets, but here’s a third option... one with no screen at all. Evolve, a little gadget from the radio and loudspeaker company Intempo, does away with the need for an LCD display by using your TV set instead. The omission of such an expensive component means they can flog it for as little as £150.

Intempo chooses to do this through factory outlets and TV shopping channels, which doesn’t generally fill one with confidence – but if you want to browse the internet on your telly, it could be just what you need.

Unlike a regular iPad, you don’t carry the Evolve around with you. Instead, you leave it under your TV and connect the two with an HDMI video cable.

Nevertheless, you have the guts of an Android tablet with built-in WiFi, which means you can connect to the BBC iPlayer, Facebook, YouTube, your email, bank account and most of the rest of web. You navigate all of this using the Evolve’s mini remote which opens out into a keyboard.

Because it’s an Android device you can also download games and other apps, and access movies and pictures stored on computers across your network.

Products like the Evolve are part of the migration of home computing from the study to the sitting room, and the coming year will see more manufacturers jumping on the bandwagon.

Apple is already well and truly aboard, with its £92 Apple TV box. About the size of a packet of Park Drive, it also connects to your TV and the internet, and is likely to prove less fiddly than a device running Android. But you will need iTunes on your computer to make full use of it, and you will be able to watch only file types iTunes recognises. Like many Apple products, it’s really a shop till through which you can buy movies and similar downloads from a “walled garden” of content.

It does have the advantage though of being able to wirelessly “mirror” the display of your iPhone on your TV. Of course, if you (or your kids) have an Xbox 360 or Wii games console hooked up to the telly, no further device is needed.

Both of those can be connected to your home network and then to the internet, and can easily handle applications like the iPlayer and its ITV and Channel 4 equivalents.